Santorum and the Slim Slice

I went to a "natural dentist" once who told me that for $100,000 he could make my mouth perfect. I left with it agape, of course.

I once went to a chiropractor who felt that four visits a week should properly sort out my low back. At a $30 per pop co-pay, that's $480 a month, just for chiropractic.

These are but two examples of how we all see just what's in front of us. We write/say/feel what we know. We think everyone should appreciate our little slice of the world or at least understand our love of it. I engage in this activity whenever I talk to you about Air Traffic Controllers and the role of public unions.

And Rick Santorum did it in this morning's debate with David Gregory on NBC/MSNBC. Santorum sees god in everything, is bound by his religion. His views and vision are expressed through the lens of his supposed morality. Yet when he is asked by Mr. Gregory why we cannot, as a nation, put up with a nuclear Iran as we have a nuclear Soviet Union and now a nuclear North Korea, Santorum answered, "Because they are a theocracy." His concern is that "radical Islamists" find the promise of the afterlife to be better than earth-bound life so they cannot be trusted not to wish to unload their nuclear payload on the rest of us. No deterrent. He said we should be trying to move more governments toward a secular society.

Just not ours. We have the bomb and god knows the majority of our religious folks don't think their promised afterlife will be any better than a good day in Scranton. And that whole capital punishment thing sure did make our crime and incarceration rates plummet.

But that's okay. You cannot blame Mr. Santorum for not understanding the things that lie outside his slim slice of the world--only for choosing not to entertain the ideas in the slices of the rest of us.